Gypsies came from India

It seems there were four waves of migration of Indians to rest of the world. The first was after the earthquakes which caused the drying up the river Saraswati. The second wave 1500 years later when Indian soldiers battled in Persian armies. The third wave was when the Roma or Gypsies left India.

The third wave is remembered with greater clarity. This was the Roma, or Gypsies, who left India a thousand years ago as a result of the Arab and Turkish wars. According to the Chachnama, a contemporary account of Muhammad al-Qasim’s campaigns in Sindh in 712-3, several thousand Jat warriors were captured as prisoners of war and deported to Iraq and elsewhere as slaves. A few hundred thousand women were likewise enslaved. The process of enslavement was accelerated during the campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni. Abu Nasr Muhammad Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud, informs us that 500,000 men and women were captured in Waihind alone in 1001-2. During his seventeen invasions, Mahmud Ghaznavi is estimated to have enslaved more than a million people. According to Utbi, “they were taken to Ghazna, and merchants came from different cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Mawarau-un-Nahr, Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them.”[The Roma and the Persistence of Memory]

Now a new genetic study shows that the Gypsies came from India and not Egypt as it was believed.

As well as looking at over 1100 samples of Romany from Europe, they studied six samples from India and found that the similarity in genetic markers supported the theory that the founder group, of perhaps under 1000 people, came from India. The idea that Romany people came from India was first proposed 200 years ago based on similarities between their language and the Indian language Sanskrit, said Kalaydjieva. But such studies were inconclusive.

“There are quite a few examples where a population adopts a language but this does not necessarily mean its biological roots belong to the same place as the larger population that speaks this language,” she said. “So from the biological point of view we have provided we have provided the best evidence so far that this is indeed a population that derives from the Indian subcontinent.” Kalaydjieva and team’s analysis of disease genetic markers supported the scientists’ previous research on male and female genetic markers. “It all points in the same direction,” she said.[Romany Gypsies came out of India]

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